'Inventing Eden' charts the ways in which colonial New England writers replaced their initial topographical optimism with an interest in recovering the somatic, intellectual, spiritual, and social perfections that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the biblical Garden. As they appropriated and adapted Old World beliefs about the primitive Eden and a coming millennial paradise to their New World surroundings over the first two centuries of European colonisation in New England, Puritans and Quakers disciplined their physical and figurative bodies in an effort to reclaim a prelapsarian physiological temperance.

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